American journalism has entered highly dangerous terrain.

A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos -- who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder.

The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud” computing deal with the CIA.

The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”

But there isn’t anything normal about the new situation. As I wrote to Baron, “few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Security forces and six million residents are worriedly preparing to survive a 19-day "shutdown Bangkok" protest beginning on Monday (Jan. 13), designed to topple the elected government amid fears that the military may help the urban insurrection by staging a coup.

Street clashes have killed at least eight people during the past two months of protests leading to the shutdown which plans to cripple Thailand's government and economy until the end of January.

Tens of thousands of anti-election protesters plan to erect huge stages and makeshift defensive structures at several key intersections, congesting the heart of Bangkok.

"Even demonstrations that are meant to be peaceful can turn confrontational, and can escalate into violence without warning," the American Embassy said on Tuesday (Jan. 7) in an e-mailed "security message for U.S. citizens" describing the upcoming shutdown.

Thousands of people staged a "practice" march in Bangkok on Tuesday (Jan. 7), cheering the stocky protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, thrusting cash into his hands, and begging for his autograph.

On December 20th, the Cincinnati Business Courier ran an item by Randy Simes entitled “New report challenges negative views on gentrification” — and it was republished on December 23rd with UrbanCincy.com under the title “Gentrification occurring in more than Cincinnati’s center city neighborhoods.” These items reference research conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and that data extols the virtues of gentrification, suggesting that people end up with higher credit scores when a neighborhood is gentrified. The Business Courier’s headline especially bolsters such a reading.

Simes writes that “[o]ne of the biggest concerns shared by those worried about the gentrification of neighborhoods is that it is particularly those that rent, rather than own, who are affected most. This too, however, is challenged by Hartley’s research.”

The roll call of US sailors irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke who say their health has been devastated continues to grow.

So many have come forward that the progress of their federal class action lawsuit has been delayed.

Bay area lawyer Charles Bonner says a re-filing will wait until early February to accommodate a constant influx of sailors from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other American ships.

Petitions in the sailors’ support are circulating worldwide at nukefree.org, MoveOn, Avaaz, Roots Action and elsewhere.

On August 9, 2013, President Obama, responded to the never ending NSA surveillance scandal by forming a panel to give him recommendations on how to change the intelligence community's practice of wholesale spying on the whole world. Although the panel was touted as independent and tasked with safeguarding liberties, its function was very different both in its inception and execution.

The panel answered to the president through Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and consisted of intelligence community and Obama administration insiders. The charge of the review panel was to “assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.”